Christmas Eve with the Eagle

Christmas Eve with the Eagle

The Eagle always celebrated Christmas by decorating the main panel.



Location; Christmas



Picture, Eagle, Vol 6. No. 51 December 23, 1955, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Eltham we have lost, part 3........ Making hay a rick at Lyme Farm

Another of those pictures of Eltham’s past which need no comment

This was  Lyme Farm as the labourers were constructing a hay rick in 1909.

Later I the month I think I will return to Lyme Farm and explore its history and some of the people who lived and worked there.


Picture; making hay a rick at Lyme Farm from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

One canal …… 18 pictures ……. 45 or so years ago .......... walking the Rochdale in 1979

 A short series bringing together for the first time pictures I took walking the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.*

Most have appeared before but not together in the order in which I walked the Canal back in 1979.

But given my memory and my total failure to make notes of each shot at the time I took them some may well be out of sync.

Back then the canal was still in a shabby state and despite the work of restoration there was still an air of decay, which was added to by the state of the buildings which stood along its path.

Many had seen better days, a few were derelict waiting for something to happen, and since I walked the walk some have been demolished and some have been renovated.

Once you had walked underneath St James’s Building and Oxford Road you had a clear waljk down the canal as far as the bridge which carried Albion Street into town.

Today this section is flanked with modern buildings but in 1979, the walk took you past a heap of warehouses and factories dating from the 19th century and offered up fine views of the Refuge Building.

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One canal …18 pictures ,walking the Rochdale Canal in 1979, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

 

Looking for stories ………. from one house in Chorlton

Now, it has become popular to take a pretty ordinary house and trace its story back in time.

The house, 1959

I have to confess it is something I have done with three of the houses I have lived in over the last seventy years, and more recently the idea has become a successful television series.*

All of which is an introduction to Bamburh House on High Lane.

It featured yesterday on the blog when I began to explore its history.

And I have returned today with part two.  It was to be the story of some of the domestic servants who toiled away in the background rarely recognized, but essential to the well being of the family who employed them.

The idea was partly prompted by my own interest in those “who toiled”, and also from a comment by Sarah, the present owner that “When we bought the house we opened up the attics and there was a bedroom for a maid up there. 

I will dig out the pictures just for your interest because although the staircase carried up to her room she would’ve had to bend  double to get under the roof to enter”.

But as so often happens their stories are harder to piece together, and despite an afternoon wandering the records the four I chose led almost nowhere.

I had started in 1871 when the house was built, with a Miss Taylor aged 23, and young Agnes who was just 14 and employed as a “nurse”, but the enumerator’s handwriting was almost undecipherable, and my best shots led nowhere.

And while a decade later I could at least identify a Sarah A Edwards and John Strawbridge, they too remain in the shadows.

High Lane, 1881, the house marked with an X

Still there are plenty more to look for, and in time I will go looking.

All of which leaves me falling back on the house and exploring a little bit more of its past, which begins with an interesting mystery concerning John Strawbridge who in 1881 is described as a groom, suggesting the then owners had a horse and carriage.  Maps of the period show outbuildings behind the house on the west side, but later census returns make no reference to a groom.

The last census records that in 1911 Mr. Robert Newberry West, who was a surgeon, employed Elizabeth Parker as “cook-domestic” who was charged with maintaining the elven rooms and cooking for Mr. West, his mother and his two siblings.

The house, 1881, marked with an X

I have to say I have been drawn to Robert West, partly because he was born  in Camberwell,  close to where I was born and grew up in south east London and because we can track his progress from London to Chorlton-on Medlock where his father was the vicar at St Stephens and on to Southport where he lived with his widowed mother.  

He married in 1920 at the grand old age of 47, living on Upper Chorlton Road and finally Barlow Moor Road where he died in 1924.

Nor is that quite the end of the story, because like many bigger properties in south Manchester,  Bamburh House finally succumbed to multi occupancy.

Just when this happened is unclear.  

In 1929 the directories show that it was occupied by the Morris family, but a decade later the house was divided in to five flats of which two were unoccupied.  The remaining three were occupied by a sales manager and sales assistant, neither of whom were married, and Mr. and Mrs. Bond and their young daughter. Mr. John Bond was a sales manager for a tobacco and drugs company, his wife Doris was “an assistant hospital nurse” and Rita, their daughter was just 2 years old.

After which the house continued its long association with multi occupancy.  In 1954 it was home to three tenants, and in 1962 to four, and it remained so until Sarah bought the property and returned it to family use, which of course has been a trend across Chorlton.

With thanks to Sarah for allowing me to profile her house and Tony Petrie who supplied the street directories for 1929, 1959, and 1962.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

The house, 1956

Pictures; the house in 1959, A. E. Landers, m17886, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass High Lane in 1881, from the 1881 Withinton Board of Health map, courtesy Trafford Local Studies Centre, https://www.artuk.org/visit/venues/trafford-local-studies-centre-6551 and in 1956 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1956

*The story of a house, 

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall 

The story of one house in Lausanne Road, 

The house on Harrow Road in Leicester, 

The art of Christmas ………. part three

The third in the series featuring festive menus from Blackpool hotels covering the period from the late 1940s through to 1969.

They come from the collection of Suzanne Morehead who kindly passed them over to me a few years ago.

I have always planned to use them in a series but always missed the boat of featuring them at Christmas, and running the stories in April seemed a bit daft.

What I particularly like about them is the artwork, which is a style I remember so well from the period.

1947 will have been the first Christmas after the war that many people decided it was time to spend the holiday away in a hotel letting someone else do the business of coking cleaning and entertaining.

And even given the restrictions of rationing and shortages it will have been an attractive proposition, even though it will have been restricted to a handful of the well off.

But during the 1950s into the 60s with growing prosperity and rising expectations there will have been more who fancied a Christmas or New Year away.

Location, Blackpool, 1947-69

Pictures; from various hotels, 1947-1969, from the collection of Suzanne Morehead

Robin .... A Christmas Annual from the Hulton Press, in 1953

This is another of those comic annuals which were published by Hulton Press.

Robin was aimed at very young children and while I remember getting the comic and perhaps even the first annual in 1953 sadly neither comic or book have made their way into my collection.

So I have fallen back on a wonderful site dedicated to the Eagle Annual  for this image of the first Robin Annual.*

Eagle, along with Girl and Swift were the companion comics and books which Hulton was responsible for during the 1950s, and for anyone wanting to know more or recreate their childhood the Eagle Annual site  is a wonderful starting point.

Robin contained a lot of colour strips and short stories which parents could read to their children and given the decade it came out in it included stories on Andy Pandy and the Flower Pot Men.

Number one also featured Birthday wishes to the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

And even with the help of the Eagle Annual site that is about the extent of my knowledge, although I can remember cutting the comic up for its comic figures.

Alas all a long time ago.

Now given that this is the end of the short series on the Hulton four I shall also mention Eagle Times, which for the last 25 years has set about keeping the Eagle comic alive with stories features and conversations with those directly involved with it during the 1950s.**

Picture; Robin Annual Nu 1, 1953, courtesy of Eagle Annual

*Eagle Annual, http://www.eagleannual.info/contents.php

**Eagle Times, http://eagle-times.blogspot.co.uk/

Shopping for Christmas ..... with T.C. Whitaker on Beech Road

It is the shop of Thomas Charles Whittaker at the bottom of Beech Road where it curves round into the Green.

And for me the attractions are many.  First we have a date, secondly it is possible to identify three of the four people in the picture and lastly there is that wonderful detail of all that the shop had to offer.

The date is 1906 and judging by the adverts for “CHOICE NEW CURRANTS AND SULTANAS [for] XMAS”and the boxes of Mincemeat we must be in late November or December.*

Standing in front of the shop by the open door in Thomas who was 40 years old when the picture was taken and to his right is his son “Charlie” and away in the corner is Mr Fox who the caption tells us was about to become the manager of the Stanley Grove shop.

Now it says something about the concentration of people around the green that old Thomas Whittaker could feel it made business sense to open another shop just round the corner and off the green, and later had another store I am told on Ivy Green Road.

But the captions and the photograph do not quite fit.  If the date is indeed 1906 then the figure to the left of Thomas Whitaker cannot be his son Charlie who would have been just ten years old, and while the Fox family lived at 19 Stanley Grove there is no evidence that they were running a shop at any time between 1903 and 1911.

There was a grocery shop at number 2 but this was run by the Whitely family.  Interestingly enough it was still a shop as late as 1972 and today while it is a residential property it is possible to see its origins as a shop.

So all of this points to a later date perhaps closer to the Great War or perhaps after 1918which  would be more creditable given the appearance of Thomas and his son Charlie. So all that is needed is a trawl of the later street directories for Stanley Grove and the occupants of nu 2.

And I suspect that the Whittaker’s bought up the little grocery story sometime after 1911, by which time widow Whitely was 55.

Now I am in real danger of becoming boring and reducing the story to something like the medieval debate on how many angels could dance on a pin head.**

So instead I will return to those wonderful shop displays which have all the brash marketing of that famous slogan “pile them high and sell them cheap.”  The windows are covered with products and adverts for products, ranging from fruit to biscuits and those great sides of meat hanging in the open while beside them over the door is an assortment of brushes.

All of which might allow Thomas to claim that from his shop there was all that the discerning shopper might want.

And of course there are all the household names that are still familiar from OXO and Crawfords, to Bovril and Skipper Sardines.  I like even the carefully crafted descriptions either side of the family name announcing the shop as a place of “High class Provisions, Family Grocer and Italian Warehouseman”

It is not the only photograph in the collection and I must at a later date introduce another which will have been taken at the same time and shows Mr Rogers with the horse and cart.  But that as they say is for another time.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection.

* There will be those Christmas experts who will point out that the date must be earlier in the year for no one serious about Christmas cakes and puddings would leave it till November to make them.

**Which apparently is really a piece of propaganda put about during the Reformation to discredit Catholic theology.